Nobody will ever fully understand what happened in China's Cultural
Revolution, the decade-long upheaval that plunged the world's most populous
country into chaos and reduced a billion people's culture to one little
red book and eight "model revolutionary works." The politics
of it are clear enough: it was sparked deliberately by Mao Zedong as
a means of toppling his supposedly right-wing enemies in the communist
party and reclaiming full power for himself. But the forces it unleashed
were beyond anyone's expectations and beyond the rest of the world's
comprehension. All teenage urban school kids were encouraged to devote
themselves blindly to Mao by rebelling against all other authority figures.
Mao likened these kids, who ran out of control for nearly three years,
to the "morning sun."

Carma Hinton and her colleagues (directors of the brilliant Gate of
Heavenly Peace , on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre) don't pretend
to "explain" the Cultural Revolution, but do make a huge contribution
to our understanding of what was going on in the minds of those teenage
Red Guards. They trace the impulse to rebel back to various pop-culture
favourites (including the novel Monkey , which glorifies disobedience,
and a Russian adaptation of the English Victorian novel The Gadfly ,
in which a son turns against his "bad father"). They show
previously unseen documentary footage of Red Guards destroying "feudal"
relics shot by Zhao Likui. They interview people who have never spoken
on the record before, such as Liu Shaoqi's widow and daughter and the
Red Guard leader Luo Xiaohai. And they assemble all of this material
with such intelligence and precision that they illuminate an entire
period in modern Chinese history with a clarity never seen before.